Texas A&M Physics Department Hosts Workshop to Train Physics Teachers for Rural Schools

Texas A&M University is opening its classrooms this week to train physics teachers from rural Texas high schools, which often turn to teachers with biology or chemistry degrees to teach the physics classes also.

The Department of Physics is playing host to a five-day workshop designed to give teachers without degrees in physics a deeper grounding in the subject while instructing them in teaching technologies and strategies.

Thirty-five teachers from high schools around the state are on campus for the American Association of Physics Teachers workshop, which began June 9 and concludes Friday. Texas A&M is providing lodging and classrooms as well as logistical support.

Thirty-five teachers gathered from around the state to participate in this year’s Physics Teachers workshop.

The Department of Physics has a tradition of training physics teachers that extends at least as far back as the Physics Enhancement Program founded several years ago by former Texas A&M Professor of Physics Robert Beck Clark. “He put so much into it,” said Brian Self, a physics teacher at Allen High School whose degree is in biology. Self attended Clark’s program and now is a mentor for teachers in this week’s workshop, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

In Wednesday’s sessions, workshop leaders such as Anne Sung, a 24-year-old Harvard physics graduate now teaching at Edcouch-Elsa High School, in Hidalgo County, guided teachers through mock lessons at Heldenfels Hall. In one lesson, Sung invited two burly teachers to pull hard from opposite ends of a rope. Then she asked a petite teacher to try to push in the rope from the middle. The small teacher accomplished it with little resistance. Why so easy? The sample lesson moved to the blackboard, covering concepts such as sine and cosine to show how the strong forces canceled each other out.

Teachers worked in team and individual environments to learn various teaching techniques.

Professor Lewis Ford, associate head of the Department of Physics, said Texas A&M is one of two Texas sites for the workshops, a national training program known as the “Physics Teaching Resource Agents Rural Teaching Initiative.” Improving science education in the schools, long a sore point around the country, is drawing renewed focus in Texas especially now that the state has launched a new school assessment test that includes science for the first time.

Ford said the physics workshops target teachers who are good teachers but who are not as grounded in physics as they would like to be. Peggy Schweiger, program coordinator, said about eight of 10 physics teachers in Texas schools do not have a physics degree.

Teachers attend the session free but commit their time to attend follow-up workshops over the next three years, said Schweiger, who teaches at Klein Oak High School near Houston. Besides the tutorials the workshops offer, attending teachers make contacts with other physics instructors from rural districts, Schweiger said.

Texas Instruments and PASCO Scientific donated equipment for the workshop, Ford said.

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Contact: Mark Minton, Communications Specialist, Texas A&M University College of Science (979) 696-3833 or mminton@science.tamu.edu; Lewis Ford at (979) 845-3337 or ford@physics.tamu.edu